Cell phone service is still quite bad in many parts of the Adirondacks, in the 90s and early 2000s, cell phones were all but non-existent. Similarly, there were only a handful of phones that could call outside camp. Really, just a handful. There was a payphone at each of the main camps, but none at Summit Base. I think there was one computer with internet access. Good luck getting on that. So, you passed the summer quite content in having little to no contact with the outside world except for a weekly phone call.
So we would chat. About anything. It is amazing how many stories you can tell if you simply go into enough detail. Some of the stories we told over and over again (and again on this blog!). It didn't matter if the story was not particularly good, the alternative was to stare off into the woods!
Most people who worked at camp lived in tents. They looked kind of like what you would expect an army tent to look like. Not set up for portability. They were pretty good sized, made of canvas. You could easily put two cots in there and there was enough room to stand up. Most importantly, you had a wooden floor that was raised off the ground so your stuff was pretty dry. It would get damp, but usually not soaked. Kind of like living on a sailboat (which one staff member did for a number of summers!).
There were a few permanent structures located around camp. There was a nice farmhouse by the horse stables that I stayed in on a number of occasions when I went to camp in the winter for ski camp. The barn itself was a solid structure, and just like you would expect if you listen to country music, a fair bit of mischief happened there. For whatever reason, the equestrian staff tended to be female. While none were named Catherine, it appeared that a few may have shared some of the same tendencies.
There was an area named the Old Farmhouse, because it was old, and may have been a farmhouse at some point. To me, it looked like the farmhouse out of the X-files episode "Home".
I never liked spending much time here, but there were a few old barns where lumber and other materials were stored. Interestingly, a number of the more senior leaders stayed in this area. In addition to the main building and the barns, a few trailers were scattered around. Now that I think of it, perhaps they realized that it offered a good bit of peace and quiet.
Both Waubeeka and Buckskin had a permanent building that served as the camp office. Waubeeka's was a bit bigger, they had a lounge and an area where the staff ate breakfast. Even though Summit was the smallest of the camps and often times had no scouts who actually stayed there, we had some interesting structures. I wrote about the old dining hall that we used to have. This building should likely have been shut down a number of years before it actually collapsed, but I spent a great deal of my time here. That first year I got hired to work at camp for the end of the summer, I was put up in this building. It scared the shit out of me.
At the time I was 14, and I was sleeping in this enormous building all by myself. Picture a building large enough to seat several hundred people for a meal. Remove every single piece of furniture. Stack a large number of mattresses at either end of the building. Right in the very middle of this building was a single cot. I had no less than 40 feet of room on any side of me. There was no false ceiling, you could see all the way up to the roof, probably 40 feet up. At night, I was to learn, there was an active bat population. This old building creaked a lot at night. At 14, hell at any age, you are not sure whether a creak is just a normal part of a building or a sign of impending collapse. I chose to interpret each one as the latter. Still, I had plenty of room. I was sort of like a much younger, much much poorer version of Howard Hughes. Living alone in this enormous structure. Over subsequent summers we would use the building as a staging area for treks, and an indoor climbing wall was built. One end had one of those glorious stone fireplaces, so big you could stand in there. It would have been great to sit around a big roaring fire in overstuffed leather armchairs smoking a pipe and talking about the great issues in the world. It was hardly ever used. Because there was nowhere to sit and the chimney may or may not have been functioning. So we built fires outside. There was a large basement underneath. I didn't spend much time in there because it was musty and dark. We stored our canoes in there over the winter. One summer there was a sort of underground bar going on there. When you are young you are willing to drink alcohol anywhere. Nobody did anything to make it more appealing. No one needed to. Getting a large group of people together and some beer made it more appealing.
One summer, I decided that I would live in a building that no-one had considered living in before. No one had lived in it, even though it had been up there for probably 30+ years. For good reason. First, it had no electricity. One of the perks of the staff accommodations was you had access to electricity even if you lived in a tent. I figured I wasn't going to be there except on the weekends, so I was cool with that. The windows were both missing glass and the door did not close all the way, so there were lots of mosquitoes, but you learn to live with them. The building had a concrete floor. Over time, perhaps due to freezing and unfreezing or another construction defect, the floor developed some enormous cracks and the floor was anything but level. Some sections had been pushed up close to a foot higher than others. But, there was enough flattish space to put your rack and you learned to navigate the hills even in the dark. Plus, how many buildings can boast both a concrete floor and portions of a lawn! It was pretty good sized, and for a while I had it to myself. Then another guide joined me and it made it far more fun. I think we even managed to jury rig a long extension cord to get some electricity. By far the most redeeming feature was the metal roof. There is nothing like sleeping under a metal roof in a down pour. It is simultaneously deafening and soothing. I longed for rain. I guess looking back on it, perhaps what I did next was a mistake. But I am not so sure.
There were at least two soda machines on camp property and scouts went through a lot of soda. Each one of those cans had a 5 cent deposit. I volunteered to return all the cans at the end of the summer, and amazingly enough camp agreed. I don't think I even needed to split the profits with them, but I may have. It was not until a couple of weeks in that I realized what I had signed on to. Each week I would come back from guiding a trip and realize that my building was shrinking. I guess inherent to the deal of me agreeing to return the cans was that I would be responsible for storing them. Towards the end of the summer, it was like something out of the show "Hoarders". It was just bags and bags of empty soda cans everywhere. It is hard to describe, but the odor of fermenting soda can be quite overwhelming when surrounded by it.
Summer came to an end, and I was sitting on a pile of aluminum gold! We filled an entire dump truck with these bags of cans and set off for a place to return them. This was not easy. We couldn't take them to a grocery store, they were not set up to receive this many at one time. We drove all over upstate NY, in an aging 4 speed dump truck that should not have been on the highways. Amazingly, we ultimately found a place. Nowadays it would be simple, you would just punch it in your phone and google it. We didn't have Google though. We did have a lot of time, and a need to get rid of these cans. So we did what we had practiced, we talked. We talked to anyone who would listen and if you talk to enough people someone will help you. I wish I could remember it better, but we offloaded the enormous pile of cans and were left with a substantially smaller pile of money. Still, it seemed like free money. And there is nothing better than free money. We reinvested it all in beer.
I don't remember what we did with all of those empties.
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